Schultz's maneuvers have implications

By TED VAN DYK, P-I COLUMNIST

Published
10:00 pm PDT, Wednesday, August 2, 2006

The dust has settled on Howard Schultz's hugely profitable sale last month of his Sonics and Storm to an Oklahoma City investment group. The episode has implications for other decisions in front of us.

Count on it: The buyers and the National Basketball Association will appear to seek a new arena and lease in Bellevue or other nearby venue and then will blame us for not making a rich enough offer. When their Oklahoma City arena is available for the 2007-08, the Steers and Heifers, or whatever the Sonics and Storm will be called, will play there.

If leagues were cities, the NBA would be crass and smarmy Las Vegas. David Stern, the commissioner, began his tenure by presiding over the league's first draft lottery. Non-playoff teams participate in a supposedly blind drawing to determine which wins the right to select the best rookie player entering the league. As it happened, Georgetown centerPatrick Ewing was the unquestioned outstanding player in the draft that year. As it also happened, the New York Knicks, the league's cornerstone franchise on which television and other revenues depended, had fallen on mediocre times and needed a center. The Knicks (surprise!) won the lottery, Ewing and 10 years of big TV money.

Stern does exactly what his owners want him to do. That was why he admonished us to pay the extortion Schultz was demanding to keep his teams here. To their credit, Mayor Greg Nickels and some Seattle City Council members and state legislators insisted Schultz negotiate toward terms serving the public interest.

The NBA Way is built on the premise that gullible marks will pony up public dollars to build new arenas in their cities and subsidize the league's franchise owners. It also presumes that fans will accept ever-increasing ticket, concession and parking tariffs while at the same time not questioning ridiculous seven-figure salaries paid to players, coaches and executives. It presumes they will not notice the multimillion-dollar tax breaks and capital gains team owners reap and will accept their constant demands for new subsidies because they are "losing money."

The NBA Way increasingly has become the way of other pro sports. One franchise after another has moved to a new city -- not for lack of fan support but because the leagues and owners wanted to get richer at the expense of a new set of rubes. When the Steers and Heifers depart for Oklahoma City, you can be sure it will be Oklahoma taxpayers, not the owners, who pay off the KeyArena lease.

To Schultz, the NBA Way and Seattle Way no doubt seemed a good fit and no demand excessive. Nominally liberal governors and legislatures have blown holes in our state revenue base with billions in "tax expenditures" -- loopholes and subsidies extended to favored industries and companies -- while increasing taxes on consumers, small business and homeowners.

Nickels and a nominally populist City Council habitually bend to those with political power and money. They have extended subsidies to Vulcan Inc.'s South Lake Union commercial development, which, it is estimated, eventually will total between $450 million and $1 billion. Nickels, coincidentally, is asking for a much larger amount in a special levy for bridge and road repair, which previously was paid for out of the regular city budget.

We will be asked soon to pay many billions for Alaskan Way Viaduct and Evergreen Point Bridge replacement or repair, expansion of a stunningly cost-ineffective Sound Transit light rail system and an undefined regional transportation package. The light rail scheme, and a possible waterfront-tunnel replacement for the viaduct, could be Boston Big Dig-level financial sinkholes. Meantime, public education, public safety and social service costs continue to rise. State retirement accounts are dangerously underfunded.

We need to make choices. We did that when we said no to the Seattle Monorail Project and to Schultz's outsize demands. No can be a good word. We should use it more often.